A Combination of Coincidences
by Pianoparamour
Summary: *Love, the thing that for all her experience was based on physical attraction and professional status, didn't factor into her plans for the future; but the emotion found her anyway, long before she'd learn to call him Wally West.* -oneshot, psudo-prequel to "Flash and Pain"-


Linda Park had always liked the Flash. Though thoughts of him didn't keep her up at night, giggling over him as if he were the High School Quarterback and she his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, she liked him just the same. Admittedly (and much to her chagrin) such comic instances occurred—every once in a while—but Linda's fascination with the hero went much deeper, and she unequivocally recognized as much. That's why, uncharacteristically, she gave the man such a hard time when his means of protection damaged Central and Keystone City's infrastructures. Her guard was up.

Linda had a reputation for being as delicate with on-site interviewees as a porcelain doll; using her soft but striking beauty in highly antifeminist fashion, the Korean-American with looks to match the gentle disposition found it easy to hook her prey around her little finger, suckering unintended scandal out of their mouths before they knew they'd been duped a quite voice and pretty face. Linda Park, appearances aside, was a hardened reported on the level (if not method) of the Metropolis Daily Planet's infamous Lois Lane. But she never turned her charms on the Scarlet Speedster to get a story. She knew that, should she fall under a spell of repartee with the equally flirty Flash, she just might not be able to get back out again. Display him high and dry, she vowed, for his destruction and reputation. Get the story a good ol' fashioned way—badger him until he cracks. She resented him for making her feel such unaccustomed emotion: intimate curiosity.

Characteristic of her truly vivacious, tenacious persona, she perused his character with abandon. She requested all his public appearances, the opening of the Flash Museum for one, and showed up in a KFMB Channel 4 news van on the scene of every major disaster within city limits. She told herself that the Flash was big news, and as the bubbliest on-scene reporter in Keystone City, it was her job—no, her duty—to cover the biggest stories and write her name in network history, but she knew better. She knew even more so when her evening activities began to revolve themselves around his nightly patrol schedule (astonishing herself with the realization she'd unconsciously discovered—no, monitored—his less conspicuous undertakings). She had it bad.

Her intimate curiosity was bordering on obsession by the time the Flash began to recognize her in the media crowds surrounding his public escapades, began to take notice of this berating, beautiful woman, and seeking her out amongst the masses. She was thrilled and terrified. Love, the thing that for all her experience was based on physical attraction and professional status, didn't factor into her plans for the future; but the emotion found her anyway, long before she'd learn to call him Wally West.

Eventually, she stopped frequenting his routed patrol, stopped requesting his every public event, because she knew the man behind the white-lensed cowl would be over every other night for dinner or a rented movie. If not dinner or a movie—on those weeks when work was a killer, or saving the world ran priority—they'd take together the occasional café lunch. The real Flash—light-hearted, easy going, effervescent Wally—wasn't discovered through investigative broadcast; he gifted himself to her. The day that a red-headed, green-eyed bomb shell bounced into the studio lobby, flashing a charming little boy's smile and asking for a Ms. Linda Park, her life changed, in the most clichéd but accurate terms, forever. What it took for the human whirlwind to trust an obstinate reporter with his most guarded, intimate secret she would always wonder, but the revelation joined the two together somewhat permanently, and she took their gradual entanglement in stride. The Flash, for Linda, no longer held any appeal; it was Wally she looked forward to discovering here on in.

It was purely coincidence on a Tuesday night in November that Linda ran out of milk at home and, knowing Wally would be by after patrol, walked the traditional route from her third floor apartment to the corner grocer four blocks away to buy his usual chocolate. It was purely coincidence that she, glancing down and into her small shoulder bag for a scrap of paper to jot down some new, uninvited investigative idea, didn't see the disheveled man staring blankly at her from the shadows beyond an alley's mouth. It was purely coincidence that Wally had, three months before, changed up his patrol route to include this city section often traversed by Linda on solitary nightly outings he regularly advised against, that he'd incomprehensibly slowed to a brisk walking pace as he contemplated the biggest decision of his life, the best time to present her with a small diamond band. But it was the combination of all these coincidences that lead the yellow bolt on red synthetic to be the last image Linda would ever see, Wally's voice—shocked to see her in the arms of a nameless addict on the final leg of his nightly passage—the last she'd ever hear.


End file.
